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Moral training in the schools is destined to receive the thoughtful attention of educators which it deserves. Orderly systems for its inculcation must be devised and established. The theoretical end and aim of the school cannot longer remain in practice a mere by-product, but must be kept consistently in view throughout the process. Training of eye and hand for skill and accuracy, as well as breadth of vision and catholicity of taste must react upon the character in carefulness, logic, patience and honesty. But direct treatment of fundamental ethics, tactful and sympathetic, is also needed. One of the readiest methods of approach is through the teaching of courtesy, since

"Manners are not idle, but the fruit

Of loyal nature and of noble mind."

The practice of good manners among the young will not only react in true loyalty and nobility of soul, but will afford also a natural entrance for the ethical principles thus applied. Children, like their elders, often resent "preaching" and are much more prone to catch their ways of conduct by imitation and reflection: hence the double necessity that the parent or the teacher be worthy as a model. But there are large possibilities for direct instruction in politeness, courtesy, and chivalry. To say that training in morals and manners should not be made a separate subject, but should be incidental to every subject, is to utter a platitude which supplies an easy excuse for the complete neglect of such training. One might as well leave sanitation or hygiene entirely to the pupil's observation—as, unhappily, has too often been done. In all schools an hour a week devoted to niceties of behavior would be time well spent. But still more time must be given to direct moral instruction.

III.

It appears probable, then, that educational attention, having largely swung away from vocationalism, will now concern itself with the introduction of more and better physical and moral training into the schools. The "good citizenship" ideal has been so generally impressed upon all classes of teachers that they are ready to comprehend more thoroughly than ever before the many

sidedness of their task. Some special phase of that task will always be in command of the bulk of attention, but the days of the fad or the mania are numbered, and the complete end and purpose is now less likely to be lost sight of than ever before.

This broadening of the vision is evidenced by the fact that teachers have largely given over vain complainings against the adverse influence of the home. They are realizing that, if five hours of the day are comparatively helpless when marshalled against the remaining nineteen, the only way out of the dilemma is to win over the home to a sympathetic alliance. This is, of course, a difficult undertaking, if we must deal with the passing generation, but true education is a great constructive labor requiring infinite patience and demanding no immediate sweeping results. Given the proper physical, mental, and moral development of the generation that is coming, and there will be raised up to the nation the home perfect which shall do wonders toward evolving the school perfect. The business of education, to quote Herbert Spencer, is to make good fathers and mothers, and good fathers and mothers will, in turn, make good education.

Germany has been industriously held up before us as an educational model, particularly by the most radical of the late vocational party. Yet Germany, by all her noble ideals of scholarship and culture, is wholly out of sympathy with these materialistic extremists. Her national stability, her marvellous efficiency in war, statesmanship, and manufactures, her leadership in art and science and general progress are due to her well rounded and well balanced system of child development. In all the storm and stress of educational theorizing and discussion and reformation, she has not forgotten that the fundamental training is to develop a healthy body which shall react upon and articulate with a staunch and lofty character, that "the soul of education is the education of the soul."

French Literary Anniversaries of 1911

T

MATTIE WILMA STUBBS, BANGOR, MAINE.

•...........................÷HE hundred years from 1811 to 1911 in France have been a notable proof of the words of the late Count Tolstoi, "The life of peoples cannot be summarized in the life of a few individuals." In 1811 not only France but all central Europe was bound hand and foot by the magnetism of a single personality. A series of brilliant victories, alliance with Austria and the birth of an heir, seemed to assure the continuance of the French Empire and the Napoleonic dynasty. But the destinies of the French nation were not bound up with the life of a Corsican general. A century has passed and the republican principles which first began to be heard in 1789 are today too firmly rooted in French soil for any upheaval of individual force or social unrest to destroy, as present events are proving.

But if the nineteenth century has shown the consciousness of nationalism stronger than mediæval reverence for the power of the individual, it has also marked important changes in the attitude of men of letters toward the exterior world. The revolution in literary ideals and methods which the first quarter of the last century witnessed was as startling as the political events which had preceded it. From the worship of the intellect and reason, from formalism and poverty of theme, men plunged into the fantasies and unbounded originality of the Romantic movement. Of the earlier of the two divisions into which this movement falls, Victor Hugo was, of course, the commanding figure. In the second Théophile Gautier, like our English Tennyson, mined untold wealth of words rich in music and color from every possible source, greatly enriching the impoverished vocabulary of the eighteenth century writers. He is said to have kept fifty dictionaries on the first shelf of his library and it was this intimate knowledge of words which gave the "Emaux et Camées" that fineness of finish implied in their name,-the workmanship

of the engraver. Unfortunately, in the words of Professor Faguet, "Gautier had no philosophy, no psychology, or gift of moral obligation." Gautier himself said in later life: "I am a man of the Homeric times; the world I live in is not my world, and I do not understand the society that surrounds me. Christ did not come for me; I am as much a Pagan as Alcibiades or Phidias.-Three things please me: gold, marble and purple, 'éclat,' solidity, color." Unlike Tennyson, then, he remained content with art for art's sake; with beauty of outward form, and no writer, we believe, can hold permanently a really high place in any literature to whom the vision of moral and spiritual beauty is veiled.

Born on August 31, 1811, in the historic town of Tarbes, the capital of the department of Hautes-Pyrenées, from the Lycée Charlemagne in Paris Gautier entered the studio of Rioult but on account of defective vision, was forced to renounce his artist dreams. It was at this time that he was presented to Victor Hugo and the Cenacle. Henceforward poetry, novels, short stories, criticisms and books of travel followed one another in quick succession until his death at the age of sixty-one. Much of his time was through force of circumstances given to the preparation of "feuilletons" on art and the drama for "La Presse" and "Figaro" and in this work he was unsurpassed. He travelled in Spain, Italy, Algeria, Turkey, Russia and Greece, and in his descriptions of these countries anticipated the Naturalist school, painting wonderful pen pictures of the scenes which impressed him, but painting them as the artist and not with the "lyricisme" of the Romanticist.

Life in the Restoration Period, especially the relation of the old nobility to the new order has been strongly depicted by Jules Sandeau (Léonard Sylvain Julien Sandeau) who was a native of Aubusson, Central France. The great throbbing heart of French life and thought soon drew him to itself and from 1828, when he came to Paris as a law student, Sandeau was more or less directly connected with the life of the French capital. His work falls naturally into three periods. "Rose et Blanche," his first novel, was written in collaboration with George Sand (Mme. Dudevant), but after his return from Italy in 1834 he wrote independently, producing a series of novels dealing with much the

same themes, without a wide range of characters and scenes, but with a pleasing style and with an increasing grasp of plot structure. Of these "Mlle. de la Seiglière," upon which the wellknown play of that name was based, is his chef-d'ouvre. During the last period, assisted by Emile Augier he prepared dramatic versions of several of his novels, notably "La Pierre du Touche" from "L'Héritage" and "Le Gendre de M. Poirier" from "Sacs et Parchemins." But it was rather as a novelist than as a dramatist that Sandeau excelled and except in collaboration with others, as in the plays just cited, the work of this third period was doomed to failure. In 1858 Sandeau was honored with membership in the Académie and from 1859 until the fall of the second empire was librarian of St. Cloud. He died in Paris on April 24, 1883.

An historian whose work should appeal to Americans, Laboulaye,* began his career with the publication in 1839 of a series of legal works, the first of which was crowned by the Académie des Inscriptions. In 1849, under the second republic, he was given the chair of comparative legislation in the College de France. Always republican in his sympathies, Laboulaye continually returned to American themes, accomplishing not a little by his exposition of American methods of government, toward the permanent establishment of republican principles in France. During our Civil War he espoused the cause of the northern states and in "Les Etats-Unis et la France," published during the War Period, gave his countrymen an intelligent study of the questions which had made inevitable the struggle between the blue and the gray. The ten years 1855-65 saw also the publication of his "Histoire politique des Etats-Unis," an extensive study of the growth of the American state. Besides "Paris en Amerique," a comparison of American and French life, he prepared translations of many of Channing's works and of the autobiography and correspondence of Franklin, of whose diplomatic visits to their country the French have always retained the most pleasing memories. After the establishment of the Republic in 1871 Laboulaye enjoyed many honors and in 1875 was made senator for life. Education in France during the latter half of the nineteenth century counted among its leaders another historian, Victor

Edouard René Lefebvre Laboulaye, b. Jan. 18, 1811; d. May 25, 1883.

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